Conference "An Ecology of Ideas" by American Society for Cybernetics and Bateson Idea Group

From the website:

The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) and Bateson Idea Group (BIG) come together to hold a conference on the relations among ideas as seen from multiple perspectives. We come from many disciplines but have common roots including cybernetics, circularity, reflexivity, language, culture and systems. For many of us these roots are enmeshed with biology, information, pattern, design, art, aesthetics, ethics and more.

In a world rife with factionalism and disenchantment, we will engage in conversations to integrate disciplines of knowing while taking into account our histories and considering our futures. We will regard both the parts and the whole that arises from the relations between the parts — and thus becomes the context for all the parts. We are concerned with the world that arises from how we live our ideas.
ASC and BIG have common interests in dynamic systems of thought, wisdom and learning. We accept that there are many views and value exploring the relationships between them, rather than in insisting that any view is “right”.

Here is the link to the website and the Call for papers

What are epistemological issues wrt the measurement of organizational complexity? Can one measure complexity or not - based on your definition of complexity?

We had some discussions on epistemological questions regarding the scientific process and measurement in general in the context of the measurement of the complexity of organisations (structures, processes). 

Differences in the definition of complexity and worldview regarding what constitutes science resp. how to do science in different disciplines obviously affect the answer - what is your take on this?

There will be value driven, socialization based, work field / discipline related differences in worldview - so please consider this in the tone of the discussion and be open and friendly to these interpretations of the world.A discussion I have started in the Quantitative Complexity Group on Linkedin

PILE and user interfacing

Apple's NeXT (as I understood it from some info available on the net) was in its object oriented fashion working in a slightly similar direction as PILE. At least in so far as it allowed to exchange information easily between applications based on its object orientation which greatly facilitated communication between appliactions themselves and application and operating system. Mac OS X has inherited some features from NeXT, but apparently (afaik) lacks this ease of interactzion between program data respectively objects as it is based on BSD which is not an object-oriented system from the ground up.

Nelson "applitudes" are a great conceptualization of how computers should work: they allow to manipulate data on the basis of a separate set of data without enclosing these data into application (and vendor) specific formats. The latter greatly reduce the usability and economics of using computer applications, because conversion / transfer of data is time consuming and thus economically and psychologically costly.Personally I did not buy many program precisely for that reason. Paper and pencil or mind and keyboard plus copy and paste from text-files are often still quicker than working with enclosed data.

One big promise in the PILE endeavor is that PILE allows to work with data in a context dependent fashion: if some data occur in a specific context than they can be handled differently than when they occur in another context of relations.THINK APPLITUDES.

PILE would in principle allow to realize such applitudes based on a layer above the relation-network that contains user data. The question then is how primary and meta data are handled. In principle PILE does not require a separation between data and meta data. In practice existing applications will have to be able to work with PILE as well which requires them to understand PILE data and separate primary from meta-data or PILE to provide program specific data interfaces.